Subjects of Difference: Māori Petitions and the Late-Nineteenth Century Colonial State

• Published in: Journal of imperial and Commonwealth history Vol. 53; no. 3; pp. 545 - 576
• Main Author: Johnson, Miranda
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 04.05.2025
• Subjects: British empire; Christian politics; Indigenous; liberalism; petitions; settler colonialism
• ISSN: 0308-6534; 1743-9329
• DOI: 10.1080/03086534.2025.2462629

For nearly two hundred years since the annexation of New Zealand to the British empire, Māori have written thousands of petitions criticising the colonial and later national government. There has been surprisingly little analysis of this extensive archive of Indigenous petitioning in New Zealand. A close examination of petitions changes how historians understand relations between power and resistance in the colonial state and wider empire. This article focuses on one set of petitions written by prominent individuals and land-holding groups in the 1860s and 1870s. I argue that these examples of petitioning show how effectively and strategically Māori countered the narratives and assumptions of the colonial state in regard to central matters of concern to their communities: recent violent conflict and the confiscation and sale of land. In so doing, Māori petitioners laid the groundwork for later activism and their petitions have been revisited in more recent decades when the nation-state has sought to reckon with the colonial past. Rather than being assimilated into the late nineteenth-century colonial state, petitions demonstrate that Māori understood that they were different from settlers. Petitions show that Māori difference was shaped not only by how the state treated Indigenous subjects but also by how Indigenous peoples remembered what had happened differently.